family, cycling and communications

Not the lottery, stopped doing that years ago. This is an IBM award for spreading the love about social media in IBM.

flying papers by Aldor

Some people think I should talk about these sort of things mroe often, ok, here goes.

The full name is “BlueIQ Most Valuable Ambassador” which along with 9 others I won in the first half of 2009. It is actually the 4th consecutive time I have been given this award, which I think shows how much I enjoy and believe in what we are doing.

The idea of the award and the BlueIQ community (it’s global not just the UK) is simply to help other IBMers get as much value out of using social media as possible. This can be as simple as a one to one education session but go all the way up to looking at ways of changing culture and processes to be more social in outlook.

Although just about everyone in IBM has contributed to one (usually several wikis) or commented on a blog or w3 article, there are many less obvious things they can be doing that improves their working life, expands their network, makes finding stuff quicker and improves their employability.

Anyway, so a global community of nearly 900 (and growing) ambassadors are there to help, to sort the wheat from the chaff of new applications and websites, to enable employees. As you know I work in internal comms, which we call Workforce Enablement so it fits right in with what I do.

In a nutshell, my philosophy is that I can’t possibly know everything that is going on in the business, and sometimes the best people to tell the story are those that lived it, so I can sure as hell help those people get out there to talk and work.

You know, many of us get caught up in what we are doing and although there will always be the geeks, early adopters and simple masochists that want to endure the latest release of everything, not everyone will. So as the human filter for the innovators in IBM we help shape in some way the things that devs come up with and try to get to the people that can find new ways of employing it at work.

Part of the award is that we get to pitch an idea to several of our VPs later in the year… I need to think about that one.